Coffee-Table Notes

Anyone who hates Edinburgh in August is probably missing the point. The last month has opened up opportunities to see ex Soft Cell vocalist Marc Almond appearing solo in discordant song cycle Ten Plagues, the Philip Glass Ensemble playing the live accompaniment to Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy of films, and young American upstarts The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) present their most accomplished dissection of capitalism yet with Mission Drift, featuring songs by New York downtown singer/songwriter Heather Christian. Then there's the chance to see The TEAM's New York peers Banana Bag and Baggage deconstruct ninth century epic Beowulf by way of a skronky, wonky, jazz-punk band featuring Joanna Newsom's trombonist, or the National Theatre of Scotland do something similar with border balladeering in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. How about local hero Paul Vickers of The Leg's unique take on DIY junkshop absurdism in Twonkey's

Bryan Ferry looks very comfortable sitting on the balcony of Edinburgh Castle. You might even suggest he looks like he owns the place. Which, given the former Roxy Music singer and style icon's aristocratic social connections, his place in the Sunday Times rich list and his recently acquired CBE status, is a perfectly reasonable observation. In a rare burst of August sun, Ferry, dressed from head to toe in various immaculate shades of blue, looks over the balcony where what might well be his subjects mingle below. Ferry is on a recce to the city prior to his concert here next Thursday night, and, as befits his art school background, is already making festival plans. “I'd love to see the Richard Strauss,” he says, referring to the Mariinsky Opera's German language production of Die fraue ohne Schatten. “I'd love to see the Robert Rauchenberg exhibition as well.” Cultural references are never far from Ferry's lips. It's like when the dapper sixty-

Luke Haines and Cathal Coughlin – Cabaret Voltaire – 4 stars Ulrich Schnauss – Electric Circus – 4 stars The Pineapple Chunks – Electric Circus – 4 stars Three middle-aged men walk onstage sporting colonial pith helmets and medals. With one seated at a keyboard and another clutching an acoustic guitar, the third stands behind a plinth and bangs a gavel before declaiming an introduction to The North Sea Scrolls, a pop culture referencing alternative history of England by left-field pop curmudgeons Luke Haines and Cathal Coughlin, with music journalist Andrew Mueller as MC. Seemingly gifted to the trio by bit part TV actor Tony Allen, doyen of uncredited roles in The Sweeney and Minder, here fascist leader Oswald Mosley served two terms as Prime Minister of an England successfully invaded by Ireland, singer/songwriter Tim Hardin was an MP and electronic pioneer and producer of Telstar, Joe Meek, was Minister of Culture, putting John Lennon under house arrest for the sa

Theatre Uncut – Traverse Theatre – 4 stars Maybe If You Choreograph Me, You Will Feel Better – Forest Fringe – 4 stars Untitled Love Story – St George's West – 4 stars If the recent spate of rioting on Britain's streets were a response in part to the alliance government's ongoing public spending cuts in a society that's been told for the last thirty years that greed is good, then Theatre Uncut now looks like prophecy. First presented across the world on March 19th this year, this series of eight plays by major writers in response was protest theatre at its most intelligent. Presented this week at the Traverse as a rough and ready script in hand performed reading in a loose-knit production by Traverse artist in residence Stewart Laing and one of the project's instigators, Hannah Price, the plays range from absurdity to anger, taking advantage of the short form in much the same way the likes of the post 1968 generation of political writers used to pe

Cora Bissett is all over the place this week. As the actress and director remounts Roadkill, the heartbreaking site-specific smash hit of the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe that looked at the human cost of sex trafficking in an Edinburgh town house, she is also preparing for Glasgow Girls. With Roadkill forming part of the Made in Scotland and British Council showcases having scooped pretty much every award going, including a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, Glasgow Girls is the result of Bissett and Roadkill being co-winners of last year's Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Prize. With the victors of this award given a small amount of money to develop new work, The Hub has already played host to the divine avant-cabaret of Meow Meow. Glasgow Girls too looks set to have a musical bent, albeit in an unlikely if audaciously ambitious context, which, as with Roadkill, draws from a real life incident for inspir

Royal Lyceum Theatre 4 stars Sex and violence charge Tim Supple's epic, just shy of six-hour production of some of the greatest stories ever told, as he magics sixteen of Shahrazad's life-saving yarns into a majestic feast of erotically-charged life that is both profound and entertaining. Things start simply enough on a carpet-covered stage, but within five minutes there's an athletic orgy on the go that's just one of a series of visually stunning set-pieces involving a gorgeous, primarily young cast of nineteen powered by the hypnotic swirl of a five-piece band. Shahrazad's deflowering by slighted, woman-hating king, Shahrayer is brutal and loveless in Hanan-al-Shaykh's poetic, feminist-centred script. Performed in Arabic, English and French, each story melds into the next with a magnificently subtle sense of fluidity that punctuates the eternal interconnectedness of things as an array of powerful women and desperate men offload their defining m

Kings Theatre 4 stars Putting a six hundred page magical-realist Zen noir state-of-the-nation novel onstage in a multi-media two-hour mash-up of film, puppetry, shadowplay and live music isn't easy. Director Stephen Earnhart has achieved this heroically, however, with his and co-writer Greg Pierce's slow-burning version of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's 1995 epic, in which the tone is set from the off by a series of black-clad figures slow-walking onstage to make some tai chi style gestures before departing. Ostensibly telling the story of how twenty-something urbanite Toru Okada's seemingly orderly life is usurped by a series of brief encounters he has no control over, and which plunge him into crisis, a woozy dreamstate slowly emerges from the goo. Up until now Toru has been sleepwalking his days away, but with the disappearance of his cat and his wife, he embarks on a mysterious David Lynch style adventure as all about him offload their secret hi